<p>Funded by The Wallace Foundation, "Singing Our Praises" enhances the national dialogue on a growing trend in the performing arts focused on larger collaborations between arts presenters, agents and artists in evaluating performance projects, commonly known as participatory evaluation.</p>
<p>Singing Our Praises represents the next generation of evaluation, taking in the lessons learned from years of collaborative projects and work with artists and presenters to develop a useful guidebook,ﾝ said Sandra Gibson, President & CEO of Arts Presenters. Callahan draws on years of experience in the field to create a new resource to help arts organizations reach their goals, better understand their accomplishments and identify when partnerships may have gone astray.</p>
<p>Designed to speak to those who work throughout the arts field including programming, marketing and development staff, artists, agents and teachers, Singing Our Praises demystifies the challenges of evaluationﾝ by highlighting glowing examples of arts presenters who through effective evaluation achieved success.</p>

Callahan has articulated a process that organizations of all sizes and capacities can carry out on their own to assess the effectiveness of their work something sorely needed in the field,ﾝ added Gibson. Also included is an evaluation tool that trains arts practitioners to design their own evaluations, reflecting the issues and shared values that are common to arts presenters and artists, shifting the burdensome and sometimes intimidating requirement of funders into a useful tool to reveal the value of arts programs. Featured in the book is a Try This At Home chapter, giving a step-by-step approach to evaluating your own programs.